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Dead zone in the tundra to turn ‘green’?

By VERA RICH

One of the worst polluters of the tundra in the far north of Russia
and Scandinavia, the huge nickel smelter on the Kola Peninsula in Russia,
may soon be a model ‘green’ plant. A consortium of the Finnish company Outokumpu
and the Norwegian firm Elkem has drawn up a proposal that it says would
cut emissions of sulphur by 95 per cent and heavy metals by 98 per cent.

If the owner of the plant, Norilskii Nikel, accepts the proposal, the
transformation could be complete in 1995. The governments of Finland, Norway
and Sweden have agreed to pick up the bill, provisionally estimated at $600
million.

Russian environmentalists have been concerned about the plant for years,
but while the Kola Peninsula was a military zone, open discussion of the
plant’s problems was impossible. There are still no official statistics
about the effects the pollution from the smelter has had on the health of
people living nearby. But local doctors estimate that 90 per cent of the
people living in the town of Nikel have suffered serious damage to both
the nervous system and the respiratory system.

A recent report on All-Union Radio alleged that there is a dead zone
of some 700 square kilometres around Nikel, where ‘every living thing has
perished . . . forests, fish, grass, mushrooms, berries and insects’. According
to the report, reindeer moss, the staple diet of herds of reindeer on the
peninsula, has completely disappeared, putting the future of herds at risk.

The Norwegian Ministry of the Environment, which was given permission
to set up monitoring stations on the peninsula two years ago, would not
comment on this report. ‘The situation in the Kola Peninsula is no worse
than elsewhere in the Soviet Union,’ a spokesman said. ‘We do not wish to
comment on statements of that sort. But I will say that the life expectancy
on the Kola Peninsula is approximately 42 years.’